Research challenges in urban transport policy

Abstract

1. IntroductionTransport is one of the most significant sources ofunsustainability in urban areas. In European cities alone,traffic congestion costs in excess of e100B each year, localpollution and the resultant health impacts impose costs of asimilar magnitude, and there are around 20,000 fatalities onurban roads each year. Many countries are now advocatingintegrated approaches to these problems, in which the fullrange of transport policy interventions (infrastructure,management, regulation, information and pricing) arecombined with land use, environmental and wider socialpolicy instruments (European Conference of Ministers ofTransport, 1995). Most of the constituent elements of thesestrategies are already available, but there is a serious lack ofdetailed understanding of the impacts of many of thesepolicy instruments and of their transferability to differentcontexts. Even more serious is the lack of understanding ofhow to design integrated strategies which most effectivelycombine infrastructure, management, regulation andpricing.Even where appropriately sustainable strategies areidentified, there are serious barriers to their implemen-tation. The recent ECMT report (European Conference ofMinisters of Transport, 2002) highlights poor policyintegration and coordination, counterproductive insti-tutional roles, unsupportive regulatory frameworks, weak-nesses in pricing and poor data quality and quantity asreasons for the failure of most cities to pursue the policiesadvocated in its earlier report (European Conference ofMinisters of Transport, 1995).The papers in this special issue of Transport Policy are aselection of those presented at the inaugural conference of anew Special Interest Group (SIG) of the World Conferenceon Transport Research Society, SIG-10, which focuses onthese critical issues in urban transport policy. Membershipof the SIG is open to anyone with an interest in research,teaching or practice in urban transport, and details can befound in the WCTRS section of the journal.When the new SIG was launched at the Ninth WorldConference in Seoul in July 2001, it was agreed that itsobjectives should be:† to increase our understanding of the performance oftransport policy instruments;† to determine the principles of policy integration;† to develop good practice in the monitoring and appraisalof policy instruments;† to identify good practice in the design, implementationand operation of policy instruments; and† to develop interactive information tools to aid theunderstanding of urban transport policy for students,practitioners and decision-makers.The inaugural conference, held in Leeds in July 2002,included sessions on all five of these themes, with a total of14 papers. Copies of the conference proceedings areavailable from the authors of this paper. The eight papersincluded in this special issue cover the range of themes,while in many cases addressing more than one of them. Inthis overview paper we have endeavoured to draw out thekey issues from these papers, while focusing on the researchchallenges which remain to be tackled. The structure of thepaper follows the five bullet points listed above, focusing inturn on the papers by Taylor and Ampt, Mackett et al.(Section 2); Geerlings and Stead (Section 3); Jones et al.,Nicolas et al. (Section 4); Gaffron, Ison and Rye (Section 5);and Litman (Section 6); but bringing in ideas from otherpapers where appropriate. We conclude by highlighting ourview of the key research challenges which lie ahead.2. Understanding the performance of policy instrumentsOne of the most significant developments of the lastdecade has been the emergence of a much wider range ofpolicy instruments available to the urban transport planner.